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Federal agents served subpoenas on Elliott and Steven Frischling in Dec. 29, looking for details on who leaked a security directive that the writers posted on their blogs. The TSA withdrew the subpoena of Elliott after he hired a lawyer to fight the demand and left Frischling alone after he let them examine his computer.

The agent who visited Elliott showed up while his kids were in the bath and brandished a badge dramatically, the writer recounted Thursday. “He said: ‘Why don’t you take a good look at this?’”

The agent was a hit in the Elliott house.

“My cats loved him,” Elliott said. “My 3-year-old girl, after he was gone, asked us if grandpa was coming back.”

After the agent left, Elliott called to warn Frischling, who got a similar visit from two agents minutes later.

Elliott also called his source.

“I said: ‘I don’t know, but I think I’m willing to go to jail for this. The question is, for how long,’” he recounted Thursday. “My source told me: ‘If this gets out I will lose me job, and I will lose my career.’”

Elliott realized disclosing his source’s name would also kill his own career.

“Who’s ever going to trust you again as a journalist?” he asked.

Eventually, Elliott’s lawyer asked for a two-week extension so he could fight the subpoena. The feds responded by withdrawing it on Dec. 31.

Elliott maintained Thursday that there was nothing secret about the security directive, which the TSA sent to thousands of airports and airlines and said he posted it because he was getting no information from the feds on new security measures following the failed Christmas day bombing attempt.

He also acknowledged that not everyone shared his view, noting: “I get e-mails from people calling me a traitor for publishing this.”

Elliott got a more supportive call from Judith Miller, the former New York Times reporter and current Fox News commentator who spent 85 days in jail in 2005 for refusing to disclose who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to her.

Miller has since has been advocating for a federal shield law to protect the relationship between reporters and their sources.

Elliott, meanwhile, hasn’t gotten around to fully organizing his thoughts about the TSA incident, because a process server pulled up at his house last Saturday with an unrelated lawsuit accusing him of defamation and tortious interference.

All of this has led Elliott to ponder the distinction between journalists and bloggers. He said agents treated him and Frischling differently, as bloggers, from how they would have handled “journalists,” and he worried that a federal shield law could leave bloggers out.

“If we don’t figure out what the difference is between a blogger and a journalist, somebody else is going to figure that out for us, and we may not like that definition,” he said.

Elliott’s definition? “If people out there are getting information from one of your blogs, you’re a journalist.”

I basically agree that a journalist is anyone practicing journalism — that is, purveying information for public consumption. I also believe in the principle that journalists are and should be no different from anyone else in their right to access and purvey information.

I guess that means that I think the question of defining a journalist shouldn’t matter, because I’m not looking for extra protections. I think going after writers looking for their sources is wrong-headed. But I’m not sure the answer is a law defining a special protection for a certain class of people.

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